[Excerpted] The oil in a slick detected in the
Gulf of Mexico last month matched oil from the Deepwater Horizon spill
two years ago, the Coast Guard said Wednesday night, ending one mystery
and creating another.

“The exact source of the oil is unclear at this time but could
be residual oil associated with the wreckage or debris left on the
seabed from the Deepwater Horizon incident,” the Coast Guard said.

The presentation said that “the size and persistence of this slick,
the persistent location of the oil slick origin point, the chemistry of
the samples taken from the slick ... suggest that the likely source of
the slick is a leak of Macondo ... oil mixed with drilling mud that had
been trapped in the riser of the Deepwater Horizon rig.”

But Ian
MacDonald, a professor of oceanography at Florida State University and a
spill expert, cautioned said that the origin of the new oil remains
uncertain. “The jury is out here,” he said, adding that it was too early
“to rule out that this is oil freshly released from the reservoir.”

....there have been persistent rumors and allegations on blogs that Macondo
is not truly dead, and that it is continuing to spew oil into the gulf.

Majia here: Below find an excerpt from an essay I wrote in Nov 2010 lamenting the silence by, and capture of, academics in the wake of the horrific BP Gulf Oil Spill

[excerpt from essay] No arena has demonstrated this disdain for critical applied analysis of
the collaboration of corporate and government power than the recent
“spill” in the Gulf of Mexico. I followed this environmental catastrophe
closely and was authentically astonished by the brute censorship,
outright lies, and calculating treatment of life exhibited by BP,
federal officials, and state authorities in their “government” of this
event.

When EPA whistle-blower Hugh Kaufman raised alarm about corexit
at Democracy Now, I was shocked by mainstream media’s censorship of his
efforts to bring sustained public attention to the matter. Also silenced
was Dr. Robert Bea, from U.C. Berkeley’s BP crisis response group, who
admitted in an interview posted with Washington’s Blog that there were
originally two BP wells and both might be leaking. Finally, when autopsy
reports conflicted in the cause of death for the suddenly departed,
whistle-blowing Matt Simmons, I began to suspect that the most
outrageous conspiracy theorists of the right might contain elements of
truth.

My efforts to discuss what I knew to be true, and
suspected might be, at a break during a faculty retreat in August were
met with contempt. Faculty moved away from me as if I had involuntarily
vomited, pretending to ignore my indiscretion. One colleague reported to
another that he was “worried about” me.

Academics are not
supposed to emote. They are not supposed to speculate on matters outside
their theoretically circumscribed program of study. Most of all, they
are implicitly forbidden from discussing anything that remotely suggests
that a small group of elites might exercise power and control over
larger populations. Academics who lower themselves by engaging in
“conspiracy” talk risk losing their academic reputations and even their
jobs.

Less stigmatized, but equally vulgar, is the topic of
blue-collar labor. Typically, the only academics willing to engage with
the lives and challenges of LABOR as labor are those few who somehow
made it through the ceiling that typically keeps working class kids from
becoming professors. Those that do make it through are often implicitly
encouraged to hide their base origins by pursuing more esoteric or
technical programs of study. Labor is contaminating. So is the Gulf.

The
Gulf crisis continues on today unabated. The ban by mainstream U.S.
media has led journalists such as Dahr Jamail to seek alternative venues
such as Al Jazeera to publish accounts of contaminated seafood,
severely polluted water, and mortally sickened Gulf populations because
similar accounts in alternative press sites such as Global Research and
Florida Oil Spill News are too easily disregarded and dismissed as
conspiratorial (see
http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/features/2010/11/201011465847225269.html).

Academics, mostly marine biologists and toxicologists, who have bravely
leaked their research to local media willing to report evidence of vast
amounts of oil, both newly deposited and buried, risk losing future
grant money and harming the academic reputation of their universities.
Faculty from the University of Georgia and South Florida are to be
applauded for their courage in the face of this potential backlash.

Perhaps
this censorship is tolerated because the populations most directly
impacted by the disaster are working class people whose livelihoods are
tied to the oil and fishing industries. These people speak with strong
southern accents, wear rough tee-shirts, and are “red.” Their rage
against BP and the government has been spurred by an overwhelming
assault against their livelihoods and their health. Although some left
leaning journalists and environmental activists have engaged with them
in their struggle to have the scope and ongoing dimensions of the
disaster recognized, addressed, discussed, the academic left has been
largely silent and stories about the ongoing catastrophe are slowly
disappearing from progressive news sites such as Alternet, Truthout, and
OpEdnews.

I include a long excerpt from one of the few stories
published recently on the ongoing disaster to demonstrate my point about the media moving on and the unheralded efforts of a few dedicated individuals to document the scope and effects of the spill:

block quote:
BP's stock has already bounced back. The media has mostly moved on. But
the long-term health impacts on Gulf Coast residents from the
catastrophic oil spill are only beginning…

Originally collected on
four separate dates throughout August, all the blood samples -- from
three females, age 44, 46 and 51, and five males, age 30, 46, 48, 51 and
59 -- contained dangerously high levels of volatile organic chemicals
found in BP crude oil, including Ethylbenzene, m,p-Xylene and Hexane,
Subra explained during a wide-ranging interview with Alternet.

She
clarified that the subjects whose blood was analyzed had been exposed to
the oil for at least three full months before samples were collected on
August 2, 3, 12 and 18.

Testing for the same chemical markers, Subra
hunted down BP's crude fingerprints out in the field all along the
coast, in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida's panhandle.

"I've
found there's still huge amounts of BP crude oil on the sediment soils,
in the wetlands, on the vegetation, and in the tissue in the oysters,
crabs and mussels." The acute health impacts of these chemicals
include severe headaches, nausea, respiratory problems, burning eyes and
throat, earache and chest pains.

Subra
is a brave soul for her willingness to document and attest to the
ongoing environmental and health impacts of this “spill” will probably
mean she will never receive another prestigious academic award.

About Me

I am a Professor at a large public university. I study political economy and biopolitics (the politics of life). My interests are diverse but are broadly concerned with economic, social and environmental justice. I have published 5 books: Crisis Communication, Liberal Democracy and Ecological Sustainability: The Threat of Financial and Energy Complexes in the Twenty-First Century (2016); Fukusima and the Privatization of Risk (2013); Constructing Autism (2005); Governmentality, Biopower and Everyday Life (2008/2011); Governing Childhood (2010).
I also participated in an edited collection on Fukushima: Fukushima: Dispossession or Denuclearization (2014).